Gever Quotes & Sayings

And it is then, when The Cause, with its greedy mouth, tries to take more from you, tries to take that part of you that you cannot give away, it is only then that you realize all of your sacrifices have been for nothing. You have given yourself to a fraud. And what is left to replace what has been taken is not a hero's pride, but a bitter emptiness that sours even that last little core of yourself that you cling to. This is the destiny of the man who serves, the man who stands for others. This is the lot of the ones who go out to confront the wolf. This is the disillusionment of all those who protect the flock. This is their secret: that they have allowed their instincts to be used, not for the protection of others, but for the gain of a few. And their "honor" is a monument to the ashes of all those little pieces of themselves that they never got back. — D.J. Molles

The idea that we can make all things safe for all behaviors is in itself a dangerous and slippery slope. — Gever Tulley

The Tinkering School. More of a lab than a school, this summer program, created by computer scientist Gever Tulley, lets children from seven to seventeen play around with interesting stuff and build cool things. — Daniel H. Pink

It can be very difficult to trace your birth parents. — Christopher Eccleston

Avoiding guilt is not the same as making rational decisions. — Gever Tulley

Kids who grow up in radically different environments are always going to have different comfort levels with regard to a topic. If you don't live near a train track, it's hard to squash a penny that way, and if you live in an apartment in New York City, it may be difficult to get to drive a car. — Gever Tulley

The more opportunities we have, the more likely we are to be able to handle the unexpected. — Gever Tulley

We put suffocation warnings on all the - on every piece of plastic film manufactured in the United States or for sale with an item in the United States. We put warnings on coffee cups to tell us that the contents may be hot. And we seem to think that any item sharper than a golf ball is too sharp for children under the age of 10. — Gever Tulley

Unless there's an officer-involved shooting or some other high-profile event going on, the Homicide Office is dead in the middle of the night. — Jonathan Maberry

The potential for engaged learning is inversely proportionate to the knowability of the outcome. — Gever Tulley

Persistence and resilience only come from having been given the chance to work though difficult problems. — Gever Tulley

When we strive to remove all risk from childhood we also remove the foundations of a rational adulthood, and we eliminate the very experiences that will help kids grow up to be the empowered, creative, brave problem-solvers that they can and must be. — Gever Tulley

Being able to jump off a swing is actually a useful and meaningful thing for a child to do ... those are the tests that help us understand the limits of our body. That's a positive learning experience that we deny children on a regular basis. — Gever Tulley

Good stories are not written. They are rewritten. — Phyllis A. Whitney

When we protect children from every possible source of danger, we also prevent them from having the kinds of experiences that develop their sense of self-reliance, their ability to assess and mitigate risk, and their sense of accomplishment. — Gever Tulley

Every child, and every person, deserves a chance to make something of themselves. — Gever Tulley

the most dreamless and introspective time of day, a sort of midnight of the daytime — Amit Chaudhuri

I'm a contract computer scientist by trade, but I'm the founder of something called the Tinkering School. It's a summer program which aims to help kids to learn how to build the things that they think of. — Gever Tulley

As individuals, and as a society, we can choose to take responsibility for ourselves. In doing so we have to accept that sometimes when things go wrong, it is just an accident. In order to change how we lay blame, we're going to have to change our over-protective habits; children can only learn to take responsibility when given a chance to assess and mitigate risk for themselves. — Gever Tulley

Every day, new laws are created that further hamper the ways children can engage with the world. — Gever Tulley

Pocketknives are kind of drifting out of our cultural consciousness, which I think is a terrible thing. — Gever Tulley

The news media is so quick to pick up tragic stories of imperiled children that it seems like there are more terrible events today than ever before - when in fact it's quite the opposite. It is, in all manners possible to calculate, the safest time in the history of civilization to be a kid. — Gever Tulley

Tinkering is a way of understanding difficult problems, of wrapping our heads around them and quantifying the unknowns. — Gever Tulley

Eventually, the time of action must come. When this happens, be a winner! Don't settle for mediocre results. Don't try to stay even. Go for it all! — Ming-Dao Deng

The evolution of playground equipment has been to this ever safer, less challenging, less interesting assemblies of equipment. — Gever Tulley

Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past. — Erica Jong

The attention is to be kept pure. In Sahaja Yoga you know all the methods how the attention, one can keep it pure. If the attention is not pure, then this desire will be always attacked by all petty, nonsensical things which have no meaning in your ascent. — Nirmala Srivastava